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Weirdhouse Cinema: Sleepwalkers

2025/4/25

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♪♪♪

Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb. And this is Joe McCormick. For today's movie selection, we are returning to the early 1990s with what I think is one of the weirder Stephen King films you could possibly ask for, and that is Sleepwalkers, directed by Mick Garris. Folks, you've heard of the ancient Greek play Oedipus Rex. I think we could call this movie Oedipus Garfield. What do you think? Maybe, maybe.

Yeah, this is a film that is notable for its incestuous cat people. But there's a lot more going on there. There's a lot. It's a lot weirder than just that.

as we'll get into. This is one I definitely remember the trailers for because I was already a pretty dedicated Stephen King reader at this point. I pretty much believed he could do no wrong. I was just reading nothing but Stephen King books. And I considered the checklist of his books in the back of the paperbacks where you could send away for them. I considered this to be something of a syllabus for life. And I would do things like, and this is horrible, but I would have my lunch money for the week

And instead of spending it on lunch at school, I would pocket it all because at the end of a week of not eating lunch, I would have enough money to blow on a Stephen King paperback.

Well, now that I am a parent, I can't quite encourage that sort of deceptive behavior. But on the other hand, that's beautiful. I mean, I love that. This is why I never read Cycle of the Werewolf, because it was illustrated and therefore cost a little bit more. And I was like, I can't. It's too rich for my blood. Oh, man. Yeah, I never got to that one either. God, I remember that same thing that the old like order form pages you would get in the end of a paperback. Whoever came up with that idea first is brilliant marketing.

I kind of encounter one every now and again in an old paperback. And I'm like, I want to send off. I want to see what happens. It's like writing into the Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan club. It's like, I want to do it. You've got that address. It's got to go somewhere.

Maybe it's still active. You ever read about those things that are like they used to have those telephone tip lines for like old computer games in the late 80s and early 90s? Oh, are these like 900 numbers? Yeah, you could pay money to call in for like tips on how to beat a computer game. And some of these lines stayed active for a long time. Oh, wow. Yeah. Because it's just automated pre-recorded messages, right? I guess so. Yeah. Huh.

Sorry, that took us a few. Yes. Sleepwalkers. I agree with you, Rob. This is a movie I saw when I was younger, I think on on cable and revisiting it this week. It was so much weirder than I remembered. And I remembered it being pretty darn weird.

Yeah, same. I must have seen it on cable back in the day. I think I rented it on DVD at some point, you know, in the past 20 years. But I probably didn't give it a dedicated viewing, you know, enough to really appreciate how deeply bonkers it is. It's full of tonal whiplash, monster madness, Stephen King, late 20th century Americana, and also a good half dozen cameos. Yeah, you can tell this movie has the feeling of like...

Of a party for horror nerds. Yeah. Like it feels like one of those movies that was for the people making it more than it was for the audience. And I'm not complaining now being part of the audience, but you can tell it was just kind of, you know, throwing weird cameos in for really no reason at all, except I think just for, you know, different horror authors and people involved in the, you know, Stephen King social circle to have fun.

You know, just, oh, I want to show up. I want to be in this movie. Stephen King himself shows up, of course. And also, I think what you're talking about with the tonal whiplash, where it just cuts...

from like a very serious somber moment to the weirdest, goofiest one-liners you've ever seen, like right back to back. It feels just like people playing around. Yeah, yeah. And then at the same time, there are stretches where it's like, it's really serious. And we mentioned the incestuous cat people. I will say that the incestuous cat people is played...

pretty much straightforward it's not played for laughs i think if it had been played for laughs the project would have been ruined i don't think it would be watchable i think it would just be super hammy uh and not in a pleasant way but it's played straight uh the goofiness kind of arises from other aspects of the film and it's a large part of why it still mostly works

It's played very serious in every scene that takes place within the cat people's house. Yeah. But every scene that takes place outside of their house has the chance to go off the rails into zany town. That's good. That's a good observation. Now, folks up front, I want to advise everyone that this this is a cat movie. This is a movie that has a lot of love for cats and.

but I need to warn you that there is a fair amount of simulated violence against cats in the picture. It's all very much above board as far as I understand. You can read about it at humanehollywood.org. But, you know, cats are the good guys in this movie, but they got to take a beating in order to have that big victory moment late in the picture.

Yeah, it might be underselling it a little bit just to say some simulated violence. I mean, you are going to see like fake cats ripped in half hanging from ropes and stuff. Yeah. But they're fake. They're fake cats. The cats are all OK. I mean, they're all dead now because cats don't live that long. But none of the cats were harmed in the making of this picture. But if you're sensitive to that sort of thing, you might want to skip it. But also, as you say...

Ultimately, a cat really is the hero of the film. Absolutely, yes. Clovis, who we'll get to in a bit. Clovis and his fellow cats are the ones that are going to ultimately save the day. So, you know, you could probably put together an elevator pitch that really stresses this. But another way to think about this, this is a film that is deeply about this strange relationship between

and this strange bond between a monster and the monster's mother. So, in a sense, this is Stephen King's Beowulf. Except there's no Beowulf to play opposite Grendel and Grendel's mother. In this case, we have Clovis, the cat. Yeah, Clovis is the Beowulf. Clovis is Beowulf. You could say that

How does the rest work? The rest doesn't work so well. I guess you could sort of say that Tanya and her family are like Rothgar's mead hall and the monster attacks it. And then, of course, they have to hire Clovis, the the outside defender, to come and kill the monster.

Yeah. And Clovis has other motivations as well, as we'll get into. Clovis is really one of the deeper characters in this picture. This is a film mostly about monsters and Clovis. Do you remember the scenes where, so Clovis is a cat who we first meet as the pet of a police officer and he's riding around in the police car, which is a hilarious idea to begin with.

But also in every scene where they wanted to have the police officer character, like, get out of the car and walk around while Clovis is still supposed to be in the car. It's obviously like a stuffed animal in there because it's holding still. Yeah.

Well, you know, cats are famously difficult to direct. Um, you know, you can hear this from everyone. The Coen brothers were very, uh, very adamant about this. For example, you know, they're very difficult. It's very difficult to get a cat to do what you want or anything close to what you want in a picture. Um, and this is a picture that has scenes with hundreds of cats. Uh,

I have no idea how they ultimately pull these shots off. Clovis hits his marks. He's a good boy. Absolutely. We'll get into the feline actor behind the performance here in a bit. But, oh, folks, you might be confused because we've been talking about the monsters in the movie as cats and then also about cats. So this is a movie, to clarify, that has a lot of straightforward animal cats in it, just like the cats you're familiar with. But then also the monsters are cats

were cat vampires. They're half human, half cat magical beings. Yeah, kind of like hairless...

cat-human hybrids that are also energy vampires and shapeshifters and wizards in their own right, as we'll learn in the second half of the picture. Yeah, the movie keeps introducing new powers for them, even in the last five minutes of the film. I think it's literally five minutes from the end credits that we learn they have telekinesis. We have not seen up until this point. I mean, it makes a lot of sense because we learn that they are old, they are ancient, they are long-lived.

You cannot be in love with this girl, Sherlock.

You don't know me, Tonya. But I want to. Behind their smile is a secret. Hi. Come in, Tonya. I have something for you. I don't know who you are, but I know you're not who you say you are. Behind the secret is a hunger. Does it have to be her? And behind it all is the imagination of Stephen King. Help me, please. He killed one of my men.

He was scared of a cat. Stephen King's Sleepwalkers.

All right. So if you're wondering, well, hey, where can I watch Sleepwalkers before proceeding with the rest of the episode? Or maybe you want to, you know, get a copy of it for later. Well, this was a major release and a successful release of that. I should pinpoint this movie made money. You can easily get your hands on a digital or physical version. I rented the standard No Frills Blu-ray from Atlanta's own Videodrome. And picture looks great. That's a great way to go about it.

But Shout Factory put out a special edition several years back, and I think this one's absolutely the way to go if you can get your hands on it. I couldn't get it shipped to me in time for this episode, but it features new poster art by Devin Whitehead that is...

Absolutely amazing. It has Clovis the cat front and center leaping out at you. I love this. Yes, Clovis is leaping out of a big wad of pink magic energy. Also, the two main monsters in the film are the sun monster, our Grendel, Charles Brady, and Grendel's mother, Mary Brady. They're leaping out of the magic energy. And then also a car.

Yeah, Trans Am, right? The blue Trans Am?

pays extra to get like a cool cover on a Blu-ray re-release. Well, I am that sucker. I am the kind of person who does that. And I'm very tempted to find a copy of this and get it shipped to me. But also, I got Devin Whitehead. You can look him up on Instagram. Devin draws. He does a lot of these posters for re-releases of films. And it's all amazing work.

Oh, I should also add that the Blu-ray also has a ton of extras that look really cool that I am also jealous that I wasn't able to get my hands on before we recorded here. I would like to learn more about this production, especially given the the cameo party elements we've already talked about. Yeah, yeah. I do have a couple of details about that as we go on. But I don't know exactly how all of it came together other than Stephen King's got buddies and, you know, he'll.

He calls them in. You might have a cameo in a picture. You might get to jam with him in a rock and roll band. It just varies. All right, let's talk about the people behind this movie.

Starting at the top with the director, it's Mick Garris, born 1951, American horror filmmaker and general horror aficionado. During the late 70s, he worked his way up through various forms of sort of cinema adjacent media, including a local L.A. cable access interview show called Fantasy Film Festival, in which he interviewed such filmmakers as John Carpenter and Steven Spielberg. You can actually find uploads of this on YouTube. Is he a good interviewer?

You know, I didn't, it seemed like he was. I didn't watch enough to really get a sense of it, but he seemed to have a good rapport with these various directors. Like a lot of his peers, McGarris grew up making like eight millimeter films, but his first credited industry directorial work came in the form of making of documentaries for such films as 1981's The Howling, 82's The Thing, and 1985's The Goonies. Huh.

This is sort of making sense. Okay, so he's interviewing horror filmmakers. He's doing making of documentaries about their films. It almost seems like one of those fan turned creator arcs. Yeah, yeah. I mean, all creators were fans at one point or they better have been. Yeah.

So from there, he goes on to direct a pair of TV show episodes, anthology episodes in 1986. One airs on the magical world of Disney. It is titled Fuzzbucket, and it's an imaginary friend story, you know, for kids. And then he also did an episode of Amazing Stories titled Life on Death Row starring Patrick Swayze. He

He followed this up with 1988's Critters 2, the main course, followed by some more TV work, including Psycho 4. And then this film, the first Stephen King film based entirely on an original screenplay by Stephen King. That is interesting. So this is the first one not adapted from a novel or from some other media. And interesting.

I wonder if that difference contributes to the kind of loose, exploratory, playful feel of this movie. Yeah, maybe so. Like, it's it's I don't know that a lot of information is really out there about how the story came together. I think there's I've read some stuff that seems to indicate it might have been an old story idea that King either wrote.

didn't get published or didn't finish or reworked for some reason or another. But you can't help but watch it and wonder what form it would have taken had he actually written it as a novel. What point of views would we have? How much Clovis POV would we get? I bet we would have had some. King definitely would do animal POVs in some of his books. I kind of wonder if it would...

have less of the freewheeling zaniness if it were an adaptation of a novel because when you're when you're adapting a novel there's kind of this feeling of responsibility you know taken to varying levels of seriousness by different directors but some feeling of responsibility to the source material whereas this being its own original thing you could just kind of let it all hang out

I do. I have a strong suspicion that if we had seen Sleepwalkers as a novel, we would have had a lot more insight into the mindset of the character Charles Brady, the Grindel monster of the pair and sort of his place in

As a character kind of caught between two worlds, between the world of predatory monsters and the world of living humans that are their prey. That is hinted at in the movie, though it doesn't feel like it really it doesn't feel like the movie really takes that theme seriously, if you know what I mean. Because, you know, he has a few lines about like, oh, you know, am I actually falling in love with this girl whose soul I'm trying to steal by sucking pink magic out of her mouth?

Uh, you know, it suggests that in the dialogue, but then also he is shown to be

essentially a totally heartless soulless character who just like wants to like run down children with his car for fun yeah and i think that's that's that's kind of a big missed opportunity with this film and that's where the film really breaks down um is that is that we don't we don't really explore his character all that much and he just it we tease the possibility that there's more there but then he does just become a maniacal madman killer

Though the madman stuff in the movie, or mad monster, especially when you get to the Mary stuff later on, is some of the most memorable stuff in the film. Like, it gets so wild. Now, from what I've read, Garrus was King's pick, right?

to direct this picture. There was somebody else that they were talking to about it, but they were pushing for major changes that King didn't want. And so Garris and King seemed to have a good remote creative process going on. I've seen some interviews where Mick Garris talks about this and it was facts-based. They were like faxing the script back and forth and making some changes here and there. And then they didn't actually meet in person until they filmed the cameo.

uh, later on in the picture. And the first thing Stephen King said to him was, yeah, fax machine joke. Um, the, uh, the partnership here would continue with Garris, uh, directing the 1994 TV miniseries, the stand, uh,

Uh, the 1997 adaptation of the shining 2004 is writing the bullet 2006 is desperation and 2011 bag of bones. Now I have to admit, I don't think I've seen most of these. I've seen parts of the stand and I know that that, uh, TV miniseries version of the stand has its followers. Uh, and of course I love the book. That was, uh, you know, a core King text back in the day. Uh,

I remember I don't know if I ever watched the whole thing of that adaptation of The Stand, but I've seen parts of it. It has the very famous opening where you're at like the government lab and it's playing Don't Fear the Reaper by Blue Oyster Cult. Oh, yeah. But anyway, I believe that Mick Garris has the record so far for feature film adaptations of Stephen King.

On top of this, he's also directed episodes of Tales from the Crypt and Masters of Horror, which he also created. His screenplays and story credits also include 1987's Batteries Not Included, 1989's The Fly 2, and 1993's Hocus Pocus.

Garris has also written some novels, but not nearly as many as the gentleman behind the screenplay here. And that, of course, is Stephen King, born 1947. The king of horror himself, the most successful horror novelist of all time, and one of the most successful novelists, period. Still writing, still publishing, and

And, you know, we can't hope to cover everything that Stephen King has done here in this episode. So let's sort of place ourselves around the year 1992. So at this point, he'd already published something like 25 books under his own name and that of Richard Bachman, as well as something like 44 short stories. And...

This all included some of his best known work and some of his best work. And on the film front, there were already multiple adaptations, including Stanley Kubrick's The Shining from 1980.

Other adaptations that he'd been more involved in personally, generally on the writing side, but sometimes acting as well, include 82's Creepshow, 85's Cat's Eye, and Silver Bullet. 1986's Maximum Overdrive, which is also his sole directorial credit, 87's Creepshow 2, and 1989's Pet Sematary.

in Creepshow, being the central character in one of the vignettes there. That's right. His Oscar Snow performance as Geordi Verrill in Creepshow. Not a cameo, but the title character in that segment. A

A wild performance, for sure. But generally, when he appears in something, it is a little cameo. And actually, his screen credits go back to 1981's Knight Riders, directed by George Romero, in which he played the hoagie man. Yeah.

I will say legitimately in Sleepwalkers, his cameo is one of the funniest parts of the movie. It's quite good. Yeah. King cameos, they vary in length and intensity. But King can be a lot of fun. He shows up in Sons of Anarchy at one point. Oh, yeah. Remember that? He's like a cleaner or a fixer. Yeah, he's like a weird guy who tries to cover up crime scenes, I think. Yeah.

Um, but yeah, in this movie he plays a weirdo. Of course he plays like this strange, creepy, uh, owner of a cemetery where the monster attacks the main girl in the movie. Uh, and after the attack is over, uh, he's walking around talking to various police officers and just anybody who will listen. He's like, look, I've got enough trouble. I don't need this action. Yeah.

Yeah, it's a fun cameo. So if you're a King fan, this film's worth watching for a number of reasons, including that. Sleepwalkers, of course, as we mentioned, was his first produced original screenplay. Again, possibly stemming from an unpublished story idea. But again, I don't think he's ever said much about it. I was looking around to find any interview segments where he really gets into Sleepwalkers and the genesis of the idea. And I'm not sure it's really out there.

I did run across an interview where Garris pointed out that King's wife, Tabitha, apparently put together a concept for a sequel to Sleepwalkers that somehow revolved around a woman's basketball team. But sadly, you know, that did not come to fruition either. I would love to see that. Cats get ball.

Now, I do want to note that this film, Sleepwalkers, this is an example of dead sober Stephen King. Stephen King got sober in 1987 after struggling with some substance abuse in the years prior. Which is funny because a lot of reviewers online who I guess are unaware of this timeline say,

peg sleepwalkers as like peak cocaine madness stephen king and it is easy to see how people could make this assumption because the movie is so wild and and especially i think because of the tonal whiplash that you already mentioned but in reality i believe stephen king has has sort of identified the novel the tommy knockers as his uh his his peak of struggles with drugs and alcohol

That was one of the last things before he got sober. And he has since quite like tried to disown the Tommyknockers saying like, yeah, I wrote it, but it's terrible. I don't know if he's ever disowned sleepwalkers. And maybe this despite whatever, whatever is kind of

Working at weird frequencies within it, it does seem to be an authentic product of the mind of Stephen King. Yeah, I don't think reviewers were necessarily kind to it at the time, but it was a success. And I think a lot of people have come back to it and appreciate it.

And, you know, in some ways it is an outlier, but there are a lot of familiar King themes present in this. You know, of course, we have the familiar theme of small town America getting invaded by some sort of ancient evil. And then more specifically, we're dealing with energy vampires, which you see

arguably, in It, you certainly see in the Dark Tower series, and also in Doctor Sleep, which features nomadic energy vampires led by an enigmatic female leader. So you could almost think about Doctor Sleep as being a return to some of the themes from Sleepwalker. I guess taking it a lot more seriously and basing it more on...

Serious characters that he'd already created and wanted to come back to like Danny Torrance. Yeah. Yeah. You could sort of look at sleepwalkers as a a gonzo reinterpretation of Salem's lot, but with monsters more less like traditional vampires and more like the monsters in Dr. Sleep.

Yeah. But also cats. And I should point out that cats do feature into a number of Stephen King works. Pet Cemetery, of course. The Cat from Hell, obviously. Cat's Eye. L.T.'s Theory of Pets. And we do occasionally get animal POVs in his writing. And again, I can only assume Clovis would have been given this treatment if Sleepwalkers had come together as a novel instead of a film. Mm-hmm.

I like how in the outline you've included multiple pictures of Stephen King holding a cat. Yes, yes. One of them, he's like crawling with cats. I think he has a big cat in his lap and then a kitten on his head and on his shoulder. Today's episode is brought to you by GoDaddy Arrow.

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All right, let's get into the cast here. We're going to start with we're going to take it in chunks. So we're going to start with our monster family, with the Brady family.

Our our Grendel character, Charles Brady, is played by Brian Krause, born 1969, American actor who kicked things off playing teens on TV. And I believe 1989 at the age of 19 or 20. And by 1991, he'd appeared in the sequel Return to the Blue Lagoon alongside Mila Jovovich.

And by the time of Sleepwalkers, I believe he was 22 or 23, which I think is perfect because he feels slightly too mature to be a teenager in this, which is perfectly in keeping with so many teen heartthrob films and also horror films of the classic period. The sort of films that this movie plays off of to some degree. And since his character is actually some kind of immortal supernatural predator, it also feels right that he doesn't quite fit in. Yeah.

Yes, but he also brings a thing that's common to a lot of vampire type stories, which is incredible handsomeness and charisma. Brian Krause is a hunk and the hunkiness is just like blasting out of the TV screen when he's in frame. Yeah, yeah. First scene, he's shirtless and then, you know, carve something into his arm. We'll get to that.

Now Krauss would go on to appear on TV's Tales from the Crypt. He did 33 episodes of Another World and just lots of TV appearances. He even pops up on Mad Men in 2008, and he did voice acting for the video game Fallout 76. In general, it seems like he stayed very busy in a range of acting gigs. Seems to play a lot of police officers these days. Mm-hmm.

In addition to his hunkiness, I generally think he's quite good in this, even when his character's writing veers off in different directions. You know, he obviously he didn't write the thing, but he rides it out as best he can here. And sometimes he has to act with cat face makeup on. So, yes, that's another thing, too. Yes.

I do love how there's different variations of how cat-like they are. There's their true monstrous cat form that we get glimpses of and then get to see more in the finale. And they're just pure...

full-blown monsters, a full bodysuit effect. But then there are times when they're in a fully human disguise, and then other times it's like cat face makeup. And the makeup is quite good. We'll get back to who's responsible for that. But in general, I loved all the practical effects here. Yeah. They've got like nine different kinds of heads and faces. And there's one scene where we get to see Charles morph through all of them when he is surprised by a cat. Oh, yeah. Nine lives. Why not?

All right, playing...

Mary Brady, the Grindel's mother of the two, is Alice Krieger, born 1954, South African-born actress who went on to find success first on the stage with the Royal Shakespeare Company, I believe, and the small screen for BBC Productions in the UK, before making the transition into an eclectic mix of films and finally achieving greater fame for a number of delightful villain roles in genre pictures.

In 1981, she appeared in Chariots of Fire, as well as John Irvin's Ghost Story, based on a novel by King, Buddy, and Talisman co-author Peter Straub. She followed this up with 1985's King David. That's the one that has George Eastman in it. Does he play Goliath? Yeah, yeah, George Eastman's Goliath in that, yeah.

Who else would he play? I don't know. Seemed logical. She was in 1987's Barfly. But one of her most iconic genre roles came later on in 1996 in Star Trek First Contact, in which she, of course, plays the Borg Queen.

a delicious main antagonist. And this is a character that she would later reprise on TV's Voyager, as well as various voice acting gigs for Star Trek shows and Star Trek video games. Now, am I remembering this right? Of course, this would not be a reflection at all on Alice Krieger for playing the role, but

Do I recall that the Borg Queen is a somewhat controversial character among Star Trek fans because it's sort of a violation of the principle of the Borg that they don't they don't have a top down control or a leader or anything? Yeah, that's my understanding. And I, you know, I'm not I'm not the biggest Trekkie out there, but I was a

a regular viewer of star trek the next generation and looking back like that's one of the things about the borg is that they're decentralized they're uh you know they're they're you social in their format and therefore that's why they're inhuman and such a threat to our individuality

At some point, Data's evil twin brother, Lore, takes over the Borg. And for a while, I thought, well, that's why we end up with a Borg queen, because Lore messed everything up. But then I was looking at Memory Alpha, and there's something about how the Borg queen is supposed to have been around for ages. So I don't know where the lowercase lore ends up deciding all of this. But I will say, I remember when Star Trek First Contact came out.

Part of me was like, the board can't have a queen. That's wrong. But then her performance is so wonderful that you're just won over. You're like, okay, you can have it. You're the queen. I put up no resistance. Resistance is futile. Create.

Krieger's other genre credits include 2002's Reign of Fire, 2006's Silent Hill, 2009's Solomon Cain, and 2013's Thor The Dark World. Now, this is the kind of role that you could imagine an actor having very different thoughts about, essentially.

either it could be like, this is the weirdest thing I've ever done. And it it's great. I'm going to have fun. Or like, what have I gotten myself into? Am I destroying my career by, by participating in this? Um,

And it is she seems to embrace it at least as far as I can tell. Like she does. She does the weird, sensitive, edible, edible cat stuff. And then she also just like goes full like Terminator mode. Like she turns into Arnold Schwarzenegger in the last third of the movie doing one liners and doing them with with evident relish. And yeah, so I thumbs up to Alice Krieger in Sleepwalkers.

Yeah, I love her in this. She's just absolutely committed to this role, no matter how weird it is, imbuing it with really like Shakespearean intensity at times.

I think her performance absolutely elevates the film. And it helps that her character is also a good bit more consistent compared to Charles. Though, again, she does go into full-blown Terminator mode, but so does Grindel's mom. Like, that's fitting, you know? Does anybody get murdered with a corncob in Beowulf? I don't remember. Well, you know, that might have been lost in some of the translations. Well, no, obviously they wouldn't have had corn. You'd have to stab them with some other kind of vegetable.

Yeah. Is there like a solid sheaf of wheat of some kind? There's probably, there's some sort of read on this where like the sleepwalkers as ancient fertility goddesses or something. Oh, yeah. The cult of Ceres. Sure.

All right, now it's time to meet the Robertsons. The Robertsons are our, you know, good old fashioned American family that's threatened by supernatural evil, beginning with the teen daughter, Tanya Robertson, played by Michin Amek, born 1970. This is basically our human protagonist. This is the main good character who is threatened by the cat monster.

the cat energy vampires. Yeah, yeah. She's a good girl, you know, good American teenager working at the movie theater and, you know, has a certain weakness for really hunky students at her high school, which is where our energy vampire happens to be hanging out and is currently enrolled in her creative writing class, as we'll discuss. Yeah.

You know, one big media overlap I never noticed until revisiting the movie this time is that Amick plays the role of Shelly at the diner in Twin Peaks. That's right. Yeah, she's Shelly Johnson from both runs of Twin Peaks as well as Twin Peaks Fire Walk with Me from 1992.

She was also in the 1993 film Dream Lover. And early on in her career, she also popped up on an episode of Star Trek The Next Generation. I think just playing like a random teen, you know, one of probably one of Wesley Crusher's fellow students. But she's gone on to appear on everything from like Mad Men to American Horror Story. And I'd say, you know, solid lead performance here. I saw pretty standard horror movie stuff, but yeah.

She saw it. Agree. She is a wholesome, well-meaning character who is hard not to love. And thus, even when the movie becomes increasingly ludicrous, she does kind of ground it because you are with her. Yeah.

All right, now let's meet her parents. First off, we have Mr. Robertson, played by an actor we've discussed on Weird House before, Lyman Ward, born 1941. Yes, he was in 1985's Creature that we discussed on the show, but pretty much all of you are going to know him or at least recognize him, perhaps even without realizing it, from 1986's Ferris Bueller's Day Off, in which he plays the dad, Tom.

Tom Buehler. Now, Tanya's mother, Miss Robertson, is played by Cindy Pickett, born 1947. You'll recognize her as well because she plays Ferris Buehler's mom in Ferris Buehler's Day Off. Oh, boy.

She also appeared in 1989's Deep Star 6 and 1993's Son-in-Law, as well as a couple of titles. I just have to mention these. No shade here. Someone has to star in movies like this. But she's also in 1996's Kid Cop and 1998's Atomic Dog. Is Kid Cop a movie about a kid who is a cop or a cop who enforces the law on children? The former.

Now, this all gets weirder. So, first of all, again, Tanya's parents in Sleepwalkers are played by the same actors who played Ferris Bueller's parents. And these two actors were married in real life. And then it gets even weirder. They apparently met and fell in love during the production of Ferris Bueller's Day Off and divorced the same year Sleepwalkers came out. Could it be true? That doesn't... That's so strange. Yeah.

I mean, I, I'm probably very wrong on this and I don't want to pry into anybody's personal life, but it seems possible that sleepwalkers finished a marriage that began with Ferris Bueller's day off. I don't know. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's a possibility is all I'm saying. We have to assume it was unrelated to sleepwalkers. All right. So that's the family. That's the good old American family. Most of the other characters in this film are cops. Uh,

So many cops. Cops walking in and out of frame. Have we seen this cop before? I don't know. I don't remember. Yeah. And then we get like different divisions of law enforcement. The main cop that we encounter is Sheriff Iris Stevens, played by Jim Haney, who lived 1940 through 2021. American actor who worked in a lot of TV shows, but also had memorable roles in Staying Together in 1989, The Bridges of Madison County in 95, and The

peacemaker in 97 his other credits include john carpenter's the fog from 1980 1990s dark angel which we've covered on the show and even a bit part as a cop in 1979 time after time that we also talked about he is the only cop in the movie who is not primarily a comedic character

Yeah. Because the next, uh, the, the next, uh, cop character that we see quite a bit of is deputy sheriff, Andy Simpson played by Dan Martin born 1951, uh, image award winning actor whose credits include 94 is the stand 95 heat, two thousands leprechaun five in the hood and a TV is the bold and the beautiful. This is where he earned the image award. Uh,

he is one of the most entertaining actors in the movie, the way he's. So this is the owner of Clovis. This is the cop who has the attack cat who rides along in his squad car. Uh, and he's also the cop who first encounters our, uh, our monster characters and sort of forms a vendetta mission against them. Um,

Uh, but he also is really funny because they just have a lot of scenes of him muttering to himself and making up songs to himself as he, as he drives around in his car. I don't know what these songs are. They're just like vulgar little ditties. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, he's, he's a likable character, but we also have a really unlikable, uh, cop character, uh, though he's state police and this is captain Soames played by Ron Perlman.

Movie trivia. In Sleepwalkers, Ron Perlman achieved the world record for the longest tooth-to-tooth jaw stretch in film history. Yeah, just about.

Born 1950. This is somehow our first Ron Perlman movie, but I think everybody knows Ron Perlman. Rugged American character actor with a very rugged look, great face, gravelly voice, frequently cast as heavies and authority figures, but with some key breakout roles, such as Amakor in 1981's Quest for Fire, Salvatore in

And 1986 is the name of the Rose. That's one of my favorites. He's great in 1995's The City of Lost Children. And, of course, he's Hellboy in Guillermo del Toro's two Hellboy films. He also famously played the Beast on TV's Beauty and the Beast from 87 through 1990. And his voice work has included such shows as Batman the Animated Series and Adventure Time. I have to say, though, this is one of your, like...

This is a small role, and it's a pretty standard Ron Perlman role. There's really nothing special here, nothing to see here, folks. This is just your grumpy, antagonistic Ron Perlman character. Yeah, just a nasty, malicious cop played for slapstick comedy, especially when Alice Krieger gets to bite his fingers off. That's right. But also, strange choice that, like, you...

Get Ron Perlman to be in your movie about cat-human hybrids and he doesn't play one? I mean, maybe he was done with that at this point. Maybe that was it. They were like, A, who would he play? There's no Grindel's dad in this. But maybe he was just like, no, I'm done. I'm done with that cat makeup. He already did Beauty and the Beast. Because he's got like cat makeup in that, doesn't he? Yeah, he does. He basically looks like a sleepwalker. Yeah. That, of course, was a show that was George R.R. Martin aligned. Yeah.

Oh, and then also, we already mentioned Sons of Anarchy. He, of course, was one of the stars of Sons of Anarchy.

Wait, I just looked him up in Beauty and the Beast. Yeah, he looks exactly like some of the cat faces. I mean, as I mentioned, they have like nine different kinds of faces, but he looks like one of the main cat faces of the sleepwalkers. So that is a that is a strange overlap. I wonder if there was any makeup artist overlap here. It's possible. It's possible. We'll get to the makeup in just a minute. But let's see. We need to round out the cast and rounding out the law enforcement side of things. Again, we have Officer Clovis, the cat.

played by the feline actor Sparks. Dates are unknown. We don't know when Sparks was born or when Sparks passed on into the cat afterlife. This is this feline actor's only film credit, but what a performance. I say from the bottom of my heart, thank you for your service, Sparks. Yes, I hope Sparks receives so many tins of sardines for taking part in this film.

All right. Let's see. There is a small part in this by Glenn Shaddix. He plays Mr. Fallows. Shaddix lived 1952 through 2010. American character actor, best known for his work with Tim Burton, especially the role of Otho in 1988's Beetlejuice. And he voiced the mayor in 1993's The Nightmare Before Christmas and also appears in 2001's Planet of the Apes. He plays a creep in this, a human creep. A creepy creative writing teacher. Yeah.

Now, are we going to mention all of the celebrity and author cameos here, or are we going to save those as we go through the plot? Yeah, we'll come back to these as we go through the plot. I'm going to round out things here by just mentioning, in brief, the project supervisor on the special effects here was Tony Gardner. Yeah.

aligned with Alterian Studios. Gardner has headed up Alterian Studios for something like 30 years and has worked special makeup effects and special effects on such films as 87's The Lost Boys, 88's The Blob, 1990's Nightbreed, and many others. He was even on Stan Winston's Aliens crew back in 86, and he was also involved in the special effects for 1983's Thriller, the music video.

Oh, wow. Every movie you listed, I think, has great special effects. Yeah. And this film's got them, too. Like I say, I loved all the makeup effects in this. Now, on the music front, the composer here was Nicholas Pike, born 1955. British composer whose scores include 86's Graveyard Shift, Critter's Two, 89's Chud II, Bud the Chud, 97's The Shining, and five episodes of Masters of Horror.

I don't have a lot of memories one way or another about the original score for the film because the most memorable musical moments in the movie are the, the use of preexisting tracks, uh, notably the, the Santo and Johnny track from 1959 sleepwalk, uh, which even if you don't know that song by name, everybody, you, you would recognize it if you heard it. It's got a very, uh, very familiar, uh, steel guitar melody, uh,

I, for some reason I associate it with scenes in a movie in which somebody is dreaming about a Hawaiian vacation. Yeah. It does that. What is that slide guitar we're hearing? Is that, I think it's steel guitar. Steel guitar. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. It's a, it's a famous, it's one of those tracks that you might not know it by name, but if you hear the tune, yeah, you'll recognize it for sure. Uh, but also not just that needle drop. There's a moment early on when we're, uh, when like we were seeing the cops walking around the scene sort of in the prologue and there's this very like sad, thoughtful, mournful music playing with this voice, uh, just humming a tune without any words. And I

I was like, man, that voice, that sounds so much like Enya. What is this? I looked it up. It is Enya. It's an Enya track. That's right. Yeah, it's the track Bodica off of, it was on her self-titled album, her debut album. But then that album was later renamed The Celts to correspond with the music's use on a BBC documentary of the same name. I was a big fan of her work back in the 90s.

And I think this is a great track. This is one of her best. Not all of her tracks are the sort of thing I would listen to today. Like some of them feel a little dated in their new aginess. But this one's really good. Just her ethereal vocals, a lot of cool synths.

Um, so I, I think it's a really solid one. Well used here. And I believe this is also the track that the Fugees, um, sampled in one of their hits. I think this song was, I think I read this song was sampled in a lot of other songs. Yeah. Uh, but yeah, it certainly, it's very, very moody track, big, dark mood that, uh, and you can see why it was used, uh,

at least at like four different points in the movie it's at the beginning it's at a few different scenes and it's in the end credits yeah it gives it that kind of timeless weight uh ancient weight to the origins of these monstrous creatures oh and then there's one more track like that there's a scene where they use do you love me by the contours oh yeah yeah and that's that's a great track as well today's episode is brought to you by go daddy arrow

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Okay, you ready to talk about the plot? Let's do it. So we open in silence with some text on the screen. It is an entry from a reference text called The Chillicothe Encyclopedia of Arcane Knowledge, first edition, 1884. And I looked this up to see if this is a real book. It is not. Okay.

Oh, really? Because, I mean, I have a copy right here. I have it next to my Necronomicon, my Book of Forbidden Cults. No, but seriously, you're correct. This is one of the many fictional forbidden occult tomes. I'm a sucker for any of these. When you own a copy of a book that doesn't exist, that's always a cause for concern. Yeah.

But yeah, so it's like it's framed like an encyclopedia entry. It says sleepwalker sleepwalker. That is that is the entry noun nomadic shape shifting creatures with human and feline origins vulnerable to the deadly scratch of a cat. The sleepwalker feeds upon the life force of virginal human females, probable source of the vampire legend. And then it's got the the Chilicothe citations.

And several things about this I love. First of all...

This is one of my favorite things to do when you like invent new lore for your movie is you suggest that the lore element you just created was the inspiration for familiar lore. So it's like, oh, they got the idea for vampires from the thing I just made up. Yes. Here is the true occurrences that inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein. Yeah. I also love that they say sleepwalkers are of human and feline origins and

And that just confused me because the movie makes it seem like sleepwalkers are supernatural in origin, but human and feline or does that mean that it's like the result of sexual reproduction between a human and a cat? What does that mean? Yeah, I don't think that I don't think it works. I'm casting doubt on this detail.

We should also probably acknowledge that these creatures are called sleepwalkers. There's nothing about them that lines up with the human phenomenon of sleepwalking or any kind of parasomnia. In fact, sleep doesn't really seem to factor into anything they do at all. Yeah, it has nothing to do with sleep. I don't know this. I'm just guessing, but I really strong guess that

It's just that Stephen King was like thinking of the song Sleepwalk and was like, oh, that's a cool word for a monster sleepwalkers and just sort of pegged that on to the cat.

the werecats he was already thinking about and there's no connection really it just sounded cool yeah fair enough ruler cool anyway there's an eerie silence while you get to read this encyclopedia entry uh and i hope you don't read too slow because there's a boo scare on the encyclopedia it's like a sudden cat scratch uh there's a cat scratch that appears like on the the so-called page on the screen uh scratches through the page and then the whole thing catches fire and burns away

This feels wonderfully extreme when it happens, but it makes a lot more sense later on. Yeah.

So the action opens at a seaside house in Bodega Bay, California. This was the location used for Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds and also was used in The Fog, popular place to shoot movies on the West Coast. And we pan from the beach up to a seaside house while a woman's voice hums this plaintive melody. Again, this is the part where I was like, wait, is that Enya? Yes, it is Enya.

And one of the first characters we see is no joke. Luke Skywalker dressed as a cop with aviators and a porno mustache. And he's got like he's got his blonde hair slicked back and with his hair slicked back that way. And the whole way he's done up. Mark Hamill is looking like Jax from Sons of Anarchy.

isn't he yeah yeah i mean he looks great here i i i did not remember that he was in this uh the character's name is sheriff jenkins by the way i don't know if they ever actually say it

He's got a name tag. Yeah, but I like the vibe of this character. I was kind of hoping he'd be our Loomis, you know, but he doesn't pop up again. You know, he's just in the prologue. It's a cameo. And somehow when I saw this movie when I was younger, I never caught that this was Mark Hamill, even though you get a perfectly good look at him. And I was obsessed with Star Wars. I don't know how this went past me.

There's a lot to distract you elsewhere in the picture. So it's forgivable if you forget him by the end of it. I guess the movie's energy is so weird. A lot of things just don't even register. So Sheriff Mark Hamill and his deputy walk around the house and it is it is revealed that there are dead cats hanging around everywhere.

And the deputy is reading off a sheet. He says, Martha and Carl Brody, mother and son. No one's seen them since Tuesday. The car is a Trans Am blue with yellow pinstriping. And then he gives license details and stuff. And a neighbor lady walks up and says, God, I hope nothing horrible has happened to them. They were so close. Oh, lady, you have no idea. Yeah.

So the deputy says, what do you think happened? And Mark Hamill says, I

I don't know, but somebody sure doesn't like cats as he is walking through a forest of dead cats hanging in the air. This is one of a number of things in the movie where, um, I can't quite tell. I think it is being done deliberately for comedy purposes, but where characters just say absurdly obvious things. Like there is one part where they're walking through this yard that has like a hundred cats in it. And one of the cops says a lot of cats, uh,

So the two cops go inside the house with flashlights. They find more dead cats, a bunch of blood smeared on the walls and stuff. And then the sound of a cat moaning inside a closet. So they slowly approach the closet and tension builds. And Mark Hamill reaches out slowly toward the doorknob and then throws open the door. And then there is a cat jump scare. Something's a little wonky about the buildup and payoff here. Like,

The cat jump scare is one of the most familiar things in horror cinema. You know, you open it, you're scared of something, you hear a little rattling or, you know, and you open a door and a cat jumps out and that that's your your fake out jump scare. But is it still a cat jump scare in spirit if you're already thinking about cats and the scene is full of cats and you hear a cat meowing on the other side of the door?

That's true. That's true. Also, do cat jump scares occur in the wild in real life? I've never encountered one. Generally, I've found that if a cat is spooked, they're often going to stay back there in that closet or wherever. Yeah. And they're going to run about like this only after they have gone to the litter box. I don't feel like cats end up inside a closed closet all that often.

They can't close the door behind them. You would have to close the door on them by accident. It happens all the time in my house because you open a cabinet or something that's not open all the time. The cat's like, it's my job to go in there and explore. And then they get shut. Okay. But then when you open it, they just walk out. It's not much of a jump scare. Yeah.

But then also, okay, the cops find a body, human body in the house. It is the body of a teenage girl, except she is shriveled up and desiccated like a mummy. And then they like look behind her ear and there is a single, there is a rose tucked behind her ear. And then Mark Hamill looks at the camera and says, it's a rose. Once again, it's like they didn't like cats. Okay.

After this, we get a credit sequence with some mystical strings playing over images of ancient Egyptian carvings and statuary with vaguely feline themes. And also, Rob, actually, I took some screenshots of the artworks we see in the credits here, and I wondered if you had comments on anything. Oh, I love it all. I had to watch this twice. Went back through. I think there's just a nice selection of images that were...

well put together here. I don't know to what extent these are all like 100% original. There's one piece that may be a detail from an actual pre-existing work or they've been augmented. But these do look and feel like pages from perhaps that occult text that we cited at the beginning. Yeah, yeah, possibly. So we see a

A scene that looks like it's from the Garden of Eden. It's like of a naked humanoid female, but with a cat head and cat face breastfeeding a human child. But the cat face is a little too cartoony looking for the rest of the image. It's kind of a, it's like, you know, Garfield here in the mythological context. Not quite that bad, but it is sort of like that. And then there's what looks like a photograph of a

a human, just fully human embracing a leopard body with a human head on the neck. Creepy. Yeah. They look like they're in love. And then there is a, I actually did a zoom in on, there's a part where we see a book open and it's a book full of text and

And the book contains an illustration of what it will look like later in the movie when the sleepwalker is sucking somebody's soul out through their mouth where there's like, you know, purple magic coming out of their mouth into the sleepwalker's mouth. But also I zoomed in on the text here to see is this is this a real text, a real book that they just did a little edit on? No, I think they composed a fully original book.

for just this shot because I couldn't find a match to the text anywhere. And it seems to be text about sleepwalkers and also like paragraph to paragraph. The text varies in whether it's trying to stay on task and look like a real occult encyclopedia or whether it just starts saying weird stuff. Like one of the paragraphs when you zoom in says, so I said to Juanita, I don't think I've ever seen anything like this before. It's a cat. Yeah.

Well, still, the presentation is good as long as you don't pause and zoom in, right? But I love all this because it couches this idea of the sleepwalkers in...

human myth and history in a sense that sets the tone nicely. And it is worth pointing out that even though sleepwalkers, as they're presented here, are entirely a Stephen King creation, cat-human hybrids are very ancient and some of the oldest creations of human culture. And we can point to various examples from prehistoric

pretty much anywhere where humans and cats have coexisted. There may ultimately be more feline-cat hybrids in global mythology than there are canine or wolf-human hybrids in human mythology. Have we somehow never done an October episode

episode about werecats or cat-human monsters? I don't recall one. We should. There's plenty to talk about. Anywhere tigers have ranged or lions have ranged historically, you have myths. Anyway, after the credits, we come back in on a shot of a blue two-story house surrounded by trees with an overgrown front yard and a white picket fence.

And I just want to frame, I noticed early on the white picket fence, the pickets, I think that's what they're called, the boards, the picket fence, the pickets are very sharp on the top. And I was like, somebody's going to get stabbed on that. And I was right. Yep. Somebody's going to get Mortal Kombat for sure. That's right. And a text legend tells us that this is Travis, Indiana.

So we're about to meet our sleepwalkers outside the house. There is a blue Trans Am parked in the driveway. So I think we know our, our missing mother and son are here from the prologue and inside the house. Somebody is listening to a record. It is again, the Santo and Johnny song sleepwalk. Now,

Now, is this a good place to talk about the record player? Because before we recorded this, we really went down a rabbit hole being like, what is this thing? It seems like they have a record player that looks like it only plays seven inch vinyl singles. And I didn't even know that was really a thing. You would have a player that like can't fit a 33 and a third record.

Yeah, this is not something I've seen anywhere else before. Like friends that I have that are vinyl enthusiasts, they don't have one of these. And I'm not really, I don't really know much about records, but I know that this is a 45. I know this is a single. And this thing seems designed to only play singles. And so, yeah, we were talking about this, like, why was this made? What is the sense of it? To quote Santa Claus, yes. Yeah.

Well, I didn't know either. I, I, uh, I listened to records. I have a record collection though. I would not call myself a record collector. I just like, I'm a music fan and have records that I like. Uh, so I pretty much only listened to a full size albums to 33s. Uh, and so, yeah, I, I did not understand what this device was for, but I guess at some point somebody wanted a record player that only played singles. Uh,

Yeah. Yeah. We JJ chimed in and had some good theories, which I think essentially arrived at the truth. But I also reached out to our friend and former producer Seth Nicholas Johnson about this, because, of course, Seth might remember from past appearances on the show. Big record guy knows tons about the ins and outs of records and how they work and some very, you know,

record curios and so forth. He makes records. He makes records. From the technical side. Yeah, he is a true record wizard, a vinyl wizard, if you will. And so we reached out to him and said, Seth, help us out. What's going on here? And I want to read what he wrote back to us.

Seth writes, quote, I'm going to make a strange equivalency, but it's true. In today's modern world, there are many people whose entire music experience is listening to singles on Spotify. This person has never once considered listening to a full album.

This person existed in the 1950s, too. Their Spotify was a jukebox. The jukebox trained these listeners that the 45 RPM record was the only kind of record that mattered. Who has the time for a 12-inch record? Not these teenyboppers. This kind of record player, in many ways, was the at-home version of a jukebox. It can't play a 12-inch record because why would you ever buy a 12-inch record?

Oh, okay. This kind of makes sense to me. And this is the opposite of one of the hypotheses I had. I was like, is this for like the super purist record collector who's like, oh, you still listen to albums? I only collect, you know, rare singles from the 50s. No, it sounds like Seth's idea is that maybe it's the opposite. It's more for the kind of casual listener who's not into full albums. They just like singles that they're familiar with from, you know, the radio or the jukebox.

Yeah, yeah. We were looking around and you can buy these things used. Of course, they're asking astronomical prices for them these days, but I'm to assume they were probably rather inexpensive back in the day compared to other record player options.

Anyway, in this scene, we first meet our younger sleepwalker played by Brian Krause. Charles Brody is his pseudonym in the current setting in Indiana, though I don't recall if we ever learn what their real names are, if they even have real names, because remember that we learned in the prologue they were using different names in California. So who knows? Yeah.

When we first meet Charles, he is shirtless, listening to sleepwalk, sitting there in acid wash jeans with a belt, looking through a high school yearbook. I guess this is the high school where he is now undercover as a student. And he's just playing with a pocket knife. He takes a moment to carve the letter T into his arm.

And then we cut down to the yearbook to see a picture of our human protagonist, Tanya Robertson. Presumably that's what the T is for, Tanya. And he even he drew a heart with an arrow through it around her picture, which. OK, how did he get the yearbook already? Like he just moved there and he's already got a yearbook.

Is it maybe from the year before? I don't know. Maybe this is how they select towns. They just get, they manage to get ahold of the yearbooks and, you know, they treat them like a menu. Yeah. Tanya's in a lot of clubs, by the way. She's National Merit Scholar, Science Fair, Photography Club President, a lot of stuff. But also there's a little Easter egg. If you look at a screenshot of the yearbook, you can see from the student next to her that the high school teams in Travis are the Hellcats. Oh, nice. Yeah.

In the scene, we also meet Charles's mother, Mary, played by Alice Krieger. She is busy looking out the window with deep concern. She is watching a stray cat prowl around in the yard and the cat almost gets caught in a steel trap that they've set out and baited with some blob of meat. So their yard is just full of animal traps like the, you know, the bear traps.

But the cat does not get caught. It gets away this time. And Mary is obviously distressed by the presence of a cat. This establishes the idea that everywhere the sleepwalkers go, their house is gradually surrounded by a sort of posse of stray cats that are hunting them.

Now, at this point in the film, we don't know all of this yet. You could even maybe just suppose that she has some sort of phobia of cats or something. But yeah, this seems to be the case. Wherever they go, cats will accumulate until they build up enough critical mass to assault the sleepwalkers and overcome them.

You know, cats are wise and ancient sentinels against the darkness and will dispatch supernatural creatures that are their sworn enemies. This is something we see in various weird fiction works. And I'm sure the idea that's its roots ultimately in very ancient traditions, you know, because cats are weird. They are allies, but they're also up to their own business and their own business might include slaying monsters.

Now, there are a lot of themes in this movie where you could argue about how good it was for the story or people can raise their eyebrows at. I think it is a pretty objectively cool premise to have monsters where one of their core features is that they are pursued by stray cats. Just cats gather from all around to hunt them.

Yeah, I like it. But also, though, speaking of weird themes in this scene already, the movie starts cranking up the weirdness really fast into the Oedipal cat sex zone. Charles and Mary start dancing around to the song. They're doing twirls and dips and they start talking about how Charles plans to go to the movies tonight because he is hoping to meet a particular girl in town. This is Tanya. Mary keeps asking, is she nice? Meaning like, can can we steal her soul?

And they banter a bit and he starts asking his mother, are you jealous? And she says concerned. And by the end of the scene, they are kissing and running up to the bedroom. And then we cut to a shot from outside the house and there is neon violet light pulsing from the bedroom window while a cat looks on from the front yard. Is this weird enough for you folks? The cat is like sleepwalkers confirmed. Please, please alert the others.

The assault begins in five days. But yes, this is so weird. And like in, you know, intentionally off-putting, obviously, you know, engaging in taboos, but also just very weird for a mainstream, even a mainstream horror picture that was like the number one picture, like the week it came out, like.

Oh, really? Oh, if you already said that, it went by me. I didn't realize it had been that successful. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was, you know, I don't think it was like one of the top blockbusters of the year or anything, but it was a successful picture. So next we go to the movie theater to meet Tanya. And you can see on the marquee they're playing two movies. One is called They Bite and the other is called Scream Dreams. Yeah.

I feel like you could have worked on some more creative, funny titles there. I don't know. I like they bite. Like I was trying to figure out what is it about? You think it's about ticks? Is it about bed bugs? I don't know. They're something bites or maybe it's something that's not supposed to bite like shoes. Maybe it's about computers, you know, with a B I Y kind of thing. Yeah. And they actually bite like disk drive, floppy drives come after you with little mouths. Yeah. Yeah.

So Tanya works at the concession stand in the lobby. And when we first catch up with her, she's vacuuming the carpet and she's rocking out to do you love me by the contours on her headphones. And she's like,

You know, I, this made me realize I'm just a sucker for a scene where a character who thinks they're alone dances to music in their headphones. Uh, there's a great scene, I guess, especially in a horror movie. Uh, there's a great scene of this in the 2009 Ty West movie house of the devil, where the main character dances around a cursed house, listening to one thing leads to another by the fix on her Walkman. Uh, I don't know why I just, I love these scenes. Yeah.

I mean, I guess particularly in horror because it

Uh, like it makes a character endearing to get to witness them having joy. But the fact that they're listening with the headphones on makes them vulnerable in a way because they're not aware of their environment. So at the same time, you get to see them happy and carefree, but also in a kind of danger they're unaware of. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. On top of just, you know, music being a great way to establish relationships.

something that your character likes in a way that's wordless. Like, here's the music they like. Now you get it, right? We don't even have to describe it to you. Yeah. And as we've mentioned already, Tanya is, I think, a very easily likable protagonist. Like, it's hard to be on the monster side against Tanya. Right.

But anyway, while she's dancing to the contours, she bumps into Charles in the lobby and she gets a good scare. She like leaps back into a popcorn stand, which has a bunch of loose boxes of popcorn stored on top and they spill all over the place. She got popcorn hair. Why would you store the popcorn that way? Yeah, they should go in the box, right? There should be a place to store them in there. So they're warm. That's what you usually see. You would think so.

But of course, it's a meet cute. Charles is, again, a like hundred watt super hunk. So Tanya is immediately smitten and she's very flustered and he introduces himself. They talk about how he's new in town and how they have a creative writing class together at school.

He says, with Mr. Fallows, the weird and the terrible. And this made me think I would like to draw up a list of Stephen King stories where he inserts the character of a bizarre and sometimes evil creative writing teacher who is obsessed with the macabre. Like, ah, yes, you know, our fourth period writing workshop with Professor Freven Fring.

And I can't think of other examples right now, but I have a sense that he does this often. And it's kind of the opposite of the standard narcissistic author avatar who can do no wrong. Instead, it's like the author avatar here is somebody who's really creepy and loathsome. Hmm. I'd have to go back and think about that. I mean, obviously, there are a lot of...

uh author protagonists in his novels as well but that's true i guess the shining yeah a creative writing professor and author protagonist yeah but generally you know the shining being an extreme example of this they are all they're often far from perfect uh yeah they're more they're ultimately kind of like the stephen king idea of a working class best-selling author yeah yes which is kind of like that's king's image like that's what you kind of think of is like

Like liberal working man, best-selling author. Yeah, yeah. And professional weirdo. Oh, also the protagonist in Salem's Lot is an author. That's right. I don't think he's a creative writing teacher, though.

Yeah. But then, you know, like the dark half, that's another author. One of the kids in it, sorry, I'm blanking on all their names. One of them is an author. Yeah, it occurs over and over again. Anyway, Charles here, he tries to buy a popcorn and a medium Mr. Pibb.

But Tanya, Tanya, like, so he asked for it. He put some money on the counter and then Tanya like looks around and she gives it to him on the house. Oh, she's a lawbreaker. And theater owners watch out. Don't hire Tanya. Yeah.

But Charles claims to have just moved to town from a different place called Paradise Falls, Ohio. And while I know you cannot actually tell what state a person is from by looking at them, Charles is not from Ohio. Do they have surfing in Ohio? Like you've never seen somebody who looks as much like a Beach Boys song as Brian Krause. Yeah.

But anyway, they, so they have a conversation, they flirt and Tanya is, is not being subtle. She's like, oh, where's your girlfriend? Do you have a girlfriend? Isn't it weird that we're both 25, but still in high school? And he, he offers her a ride home, but she does not accept. And, you know, she says like, oh, I'm getting a ride home with Lyman Ward and,

And also I noticed this weird framing where like, while they're flirting at the concession stand, there is a huge multicolored sign behind Tanya's head that says slush. I don't know if that's to suggest her, her heart is melting like a slushie. I like it. But anyway, after the movie,

Uh, Tanya's dad picks her up and then we see Charles watching from the shadows outside the theater and he's muttering Tanya and the Enya starts playing again and the mood gets very dark. Uh, but then it gets weirdly funny again because Charles walks back home. He's walking up the drive to the side door and there isn't, there's a sudden, uh, like a jump scare, but it's a flashlight scare because a cop is there collecting stray cats in a big burlap sack, uh,

And Mary comes to the doorway to thank the officer for his help. She says, I would come out and thank you, but my allergy is so severe. And then the cop says, yeah, I got one too. Mine's the IRS. What? Allergic to the IRS. Yuck, yuck.

Then the cop leaves and Charles and Mary have a debrief. Like she dwells on the menace of the gathering cats. Charles reports on his attempt to steal Tanya's life force. He didn't get it yet. So Mary becomes enraged. She's like, I'm famished, Charles. And she starts swatting at him like an irritable kitty cat. And then again, just more off the charts, Oedipal cat weirdness in this scene. Today's episode is brought to you by GoDaddy Arrow.

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So we have teenage characters. We've got to go to high school. We've got to have some scenes in the school. And that's where we head to next. Right, right. Time to check in on that creative writing class with Mr. Fallows, the weird and terrible.

Um, so today in class, uh, as luck would have it, Charles is reading aloud from a short story that he wrote called sleepwalkers. Uh, I transcribed it because it's good. So, uh, this is the story. He says they were sleepwalkers hiding in human robes, feeding on virtue, uh,

loving to feed feeding to breed in the end they ran in the end robbie and his mother always had to run for one night the men would come in their old cars men with lights and guns and to the boy and his mother their curses and their screams of rage always sound the same like the laughter of cruel gods the time of happiness too brief to be anything but golden had run out

And I guess that's the end. And people start clapping. Actually, Tanya starts clapping alone before everybody else, despite the fact that this story seems to be a detailed description of how Charles plans to eat her soul and then regurgitate it to his mom. Yeah. Yeah. It's like just a straight up confession of all the crimes that he and his mom have committed. I also cover a little bit. Yeah.

Someone with a little better ear for King's prose might also have some insight here. I wonder if this is maybe a little insight into what Sleepwalkers, the novel by Stephen King, might have tasted a little bit like. Maybe. I don't know. It feels...

Well, I mean, I guess this is supposed to have been written by a high schooler, but then again, it was supposed to have been written by a high schooler who was actually maybe centuries or millennia old. Yeah. But then again, maybe it is.

Written. There's like three levels of deception is written by an actual author, but it's supposed to sound like a high schooler, but it's actually an ancient being who is trying to sound like a high schooler. Yeah. Wouldn't it be something if this were an actual snippet from something King wrote as a high schooler, though? Something that, you know, unpublished. Oh, that would be good.

But remember, so Mr. Fallows, the teacher is played by Glenn Shaddix from like Beetlejuice. And so Glenn Shaddix is, he's like very good, Mr. Brady, if that is your real name, he's,

overtly suspicious of him already. He's like asking him questions about, didn't you say you came from Ohio? And Charles is like, what do what now? Where? Um, but Mr. Follows, we see he, he's one of these teachers who runs his classroom like a petty tyrant. He likes to swat students with a ruler. Uh, if he catches them drawing naughty sketches and, uh, he, he tells one student, you must learn to keep your hands to yourself. Remember that? Hmm.

Hmm.

That's like saying a box has four sides. And then Charles interrupts him and says, actually, Mr. Fellows, a box has six sides. Oh, pretty good. But not only that, like the class laughs and one guy goes busted to the extreme. So Mr. Fellows is clearly embarrassed and angry now. And so after school, we see him staring out the window at Charles simmering with rage. He's plotting his revenge.

And from here, I guess we are starting to run a little bit short on time. So we should maybe skip more lightly over the plot machinations and just focus on some of the highlight scenes. So there's a scene between Tanya and her friends where they all talk about how dreamy Charles is. And then Charles shows up to offer Tanya a ride home in his Trans Am. They go to Tanya's house where he walks around her room and he gets to know her a little bit. Like he looks at her photos. She has a photography hobby, basically.

We saw in the yearbook that she's in the president of the photography club. And there's one point where they like look at a black and white photo of rocks. And he says, I like rocks. There is also a cheesy gag where her room is essentially made of underwear. And she's like running around trying to hide it all before Charles sees it. But Charles then also meets Tanya's mother.

who has a hobby of her own, gravestone rubbings. I would love to know how this made it into the story, but gravestone rubbings. And it comes out to the mother that Charles and Tanya have made plans the following day to go to a cemetery in town called Homeland. This is a big set piece. The teenage characters talk about it. And this is...

quite at once a red flag to the mom because it is understood to be the town make out spot.

but Charles is very smooth. He manages to cover for them by saying their plan is actually to go there to do grave rubbings. Again, the mom's favorite hobby, which for some reason he knows a lot about, like she tries to catch him in a lie, like asking questions like, do you use powder or stick? And I don't know. He knows how to answer that for some reason. Yeah. There's some, some rubbing jokes shoehorned in here that land reasonably well. Yeah.

Um, so after this, we get the, I believe the first monster murder in the movie, uh, Charles is driving down the highway, just blasting rock music in the Trans Am when he is suddenly almost run off the road by someone in a white Volkswagen. So he pulls over and why it is Mr. Fallows, the creative writing teacher.

And

And it's implied that he's trying to do some kind of sexual blackmail against Charles. But Charles turns the tables and he goes cat mode. So like like Glenn Shaddix is leaning over him and then Charles rips off his hand, gives it back to him. And he's like, you're right, Mr. Fallows. We should learn to keep our hands to ourselves. Here is yours. Yeah.

Yeah, this is the first of many scenes where we get to see that the sleepwalkers can tear human bodies apart like they're well-cooked pork at any moment. Yeah, shredded, yeah. So I have a question, actually, about sleepwalker biology, because after this, Glenn Chaddix runs into the woods.

And Charles runs after him in cat mode. He's got a lion face and he kills him in the woods. And it suggests that he eats him like where we see from above where Glenn Chaddix is lying on the ground. And Charles is above him, like doing that thing you see in monster movies sometimes where the monster predator type being is just sort of shaking their face over the victim's throat. Mm hmm.

But this implies, I think, that Charles eats him, like physically eats his flesh, which is not what he plans to do to Tanya. Once again, the life force that they're planning to steal from Tanya comes in the form of sucking purple magic out of her breath, like out through her mouth from her lungs. This just seems like he's eating the guy. And I don't know if they also normally just eat people, but...

Well, mom is cooking a chicken dinner later, I believe. Yeah, they eat regular food. Yeah, so maybe there's like a sustenance for their physical bodies and then some greater sustenance that they require. Another theory I had is that eventually we see that Mary has...

additional powers well beyond that of her son. And it makes one wonder if essentially she is some sort of an ancient god-like being, and he is her demigod offspring, or he is her monstrous offspring that helps her and serves her. But she clearly has some greater accumulated power, and maybe that's where the need for souls comes into play.

Oh, so what if it's more like the hunger, like she's the Catherine Deneuve character and Charles is the David Bowie character? Yeah, something like that. I mean, ultimately, it's all monster business and we're not we're not supposed to understand it.

So the next scene we get, the next big scene is the police chase, which is great because it's where we first meet the actor Dan Martin playing deputy Andy Simpson and his loyal police cat Clovis. So when we first joined them, they are staked out on the highway, parked beside the edge of the road, playing with one of those dangle toys. And the cop is saying, he's like, come on, boy, get the bad guy for daddy. Get that MFR. Yeah.

And Clovis the cat is just swatting with pleasure at the toy, and it's adorable. Yeah, Clovis has a little tag that says, quote, Clovis the attack cat, I think. That is right. But meanwhile, while they're playing here in the car, Charles zooms by in his car at a million miles per hour, and Deputy Andy joins in hot pursuit.

So this turns into a whole car chase scene that goes all over the place. So I'm just going to mention some elements of it. One is the shredding. We wall guitars to like never let up. Those are really good. Another thing is that Charles seems to know a lot of stunt driving tricks. He's an experienced driver.

Uh, and at one point they're like going through a school bus crossing where children are going across the street and, uh, you know, they both see that they're approaching this and Charles like looks at the kids and then just smiles before revving the engine even harder. Uh,

Fortunately, no children are harmed. We see like the crossing guard pulls the kid out of the way before Charles comes through. But it's like that scene in the Simpsons episode where there's like the true crime creep movie about Homer starring Dennis Franz, you know, and the girl goes, no, Mr. Simpson, a cat is a living creature. Dennis Franz, I don't care. I remember that. Yeah.

But anyway, finally, Deputy Andy pulls up beside Charles in pursuit. So they're driving beside each other on the road. And at first, Charles just laughs and gives him the finger. But then Clovis, the cat, pops up into the window. And this causes Charles to not only freak out, but to go into random morphin mode where he cycles through like a dozen different kinds of heads that he has available. Yeah.

And the deputy witnesses all of the heads morphin and he gets weirded out. Rob, just below this in the outline I've attached here, a selection of some of the heads he goes through. This is not all of them. He has like a little boy human head. He has like sort of a kitten head. He has sort of a lion head. And then he has more kind of weird gills.

gummy, rubbery monster creature heads that are a little bit cat-like, but also just sort of like gray aliens with huge black eyes, then more of a gargoyle head with big pointy ears like elf ears, then more of a gargoyle head with a large cranium. It's just all over the place. Yeah.

It is an amazing sequence, and you can pause it at any moment and just be enthralled by what you're given. Yeah, it's like Clovis has jumped to attention. Clovis is like, Dad, I'm on this. I see what this is. And he's like, oh, crap, I'm busted by the cats. Yes. That freaks out. It's wonderful. And the deputy witnesses all the heads. He's weirded out by it.

But Charles finally escapes the situation by pulling off road. And then this is one of the sleepwalker powers. He can concentrate and do what they call making himself and the car dim. So sleepwalkers have the power to turn themselves and their vehicles invisible. This is kind of a...

callback to King's book, Eyes of the Dragon, in which there's an invisibility spell that one of the characters utilizes. And it's just, I don't know if he uses dim in that description, but there's this, he has a nice description of how it doesn't completely make you invisible, but kind of, yeah, makes you dim and people miss you and all. Here, though, it is visually just the car straight up turns invisible. And

And then afterwards, he's able to transform it into a different kind of car. It's like a different color and different model. I have more questions about that, the car transformation later.

But we get that scene where Simpson pulls off the road. He thinks he's lost him. But of course, Clovis sees him. Clovis is staring right at the car. The invisibility trick does not work on the feline ancient enemies of the sleepwalkers. And Charles is yelling at the cat. He's like, get out of here, cat! But we get a great shot here of Clovis in the window, unnoticed.

all of the squad car with the shotgun. You know how they store the shotgun in the squad car, like pointing up right behind it. It really looks like Officer Clovis is on the job here. I love it. Yeah. So some big things

scenes in the movie after this, of course, there's the scene where Charles and Tanya have their date to go to the cemetery. So they're going off to Homeland and the date starts off very flirty and fun. But of course, at some point, it's going to have to turn evil. And

And so, uh, there, at one point they start kissing and then Charles just suddenly begins sucking her soul out. And, uh, he shifts very abruptly from his charming mode. I may be kind of a subtle menacing charm just into full late Elm street sequel, Freddy Krueger mode, where he's making jokes. Like he's like, it doesn't have to hurt Tanya. Okay. I lied. It does have to hurt. Yeah.

Yeah. And this whole sequence feels very out of keeping with where everywhere we'd gone thus far. Yeah.

There was a great scene shortly before this where we go by the house and Tanya meets Mary. And I rather liked that sequence where Mary's being like almost overtly hostile to her and like brandishing these big scissors and all. And at that point, my wife watched part of this with me. She'd seen it back in the day.

And she was like, well, why don't they just eat her soul here? Like now's the time. Good question. It is a great question. I think this is ultimately a plot hole. I guess if you're being generous, you might say, well, it has to come from maybe their feeding has to come from a place of seduction.

But that only seems initially true. Salt the meat, to use a term from it, maybe? If that is true, it seems to be only initially true. Because in this whole sequence with the Freddy Krueger-ing and the chasing around, like, he's just overtly attacking her.

And it seems like any necessity of seduction is just completely out the window. And he's making jokes about it. That's the Freddy Krueger-y thing. Like she, she defends herself. Like she repeatedly wounds Charles as they fight, but he just kind of keeps popping back up. At one point she stabs him in the eye with a corkscrew. Oh yes. Yes. And then he falls down and then he, and then he goes, just look at my shirt, Tanya. Mother is going to kill me. Yeah. Where did this all come from?

Uh, but here, uh, in this scene, we, we get a payback where, uh, deputy Andy Simpson and Clovis turn up once again, they, they show up to the rescue. They noticed the blue Trans Am parked outside the cemetery and they arrive on the scene. Uh, deputy Andy tries to help Tanya, but unfortunately Charles shows up and stabs him in the ear with a pencil. I think the pencil they were going to use to do the grave rubbings and then declares him a cop kebab.

Cause I guess there's a stick running through. Yeah. Okay. It's unfortunate. Um, but remember that sleepwalkers are vulnerable to the deadly scratch of a cat. And so also in the scene, Clovis comes to the rescue. He attacks Charles, scratching him, uh,

And this seems to sort of drain Charles's power to heal himself and drains his resiliency. He desperately flees the scene in his car, going back home to his mother, and she takes care of his wounds. Oh, and we get that heartbreaking scene, though, of Clovis comes over to his dead master and sits on Deputy Simpson's chest. Oh, yeah.

And it's in this moment that Clovis swears eternal vengeance against the sleepwalkers. Like, it was his ancient duty as a cat to kill sleepwalkers previously, but now it is personal. The cat morning scene, I was genuinely moved. And it comes right after Cop Kebab. Yeah. Today's episode is brought to you by GoDaddy Aero.

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So at this point, our monster has been Beowulf. He has been brutally injured by Tanya and by Clovis. And like Grendel in the story of Beowulf, returns home to the lair.

Right. So in the aftermath of the attack, this is probably the place we should mention that there are just tons of cameos or people like all of the author and horror world cameos of people showing up, I guess, at the crime scene. So this is where you get Stephen King wandering around telling everybody like, look, I'm not responsible for every pervert who comes in the cemetery. I don't need this kind of action. Yeah.

And let's see, who else do we get in this scene? I believe Clive Barker is on the case as a forensic tech. Yes. Why? Well, you know, Stephen King once said, I have seen the future of horror and his name is Clive Barker. So, you know, here he is. Yeah, indeed.

I believe Toby Hooper is also on the case here as another forensic tech. Amazing. Yeah. And let's see. I think we're going to get a couple of more later, but I'll go ahead and mention them now. We're going to get a scene later where we're doing the autopsies and so forth, lab technician work. And that's where we're going to get lab technician John Landis.

We're going to get lab assistant Joe Dante. And we're also going to get Cynthia Garris, who is, of course, Mick Garris's wife. Cramming so much in so fast. And also, I think the, you know, 99 percent of the people who see these movies would not have recognized who these people were. Right. This is this was for the horror fans. I think this is for the horror geeks.

I mean, honestly, I didn't even recognize Clive Barker at first and I was on the lookout for him. He's so, so young in this. I'm just not used to seeing him this young. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. But so here we are, we're accelerating toward the ending. So the, the movie concludes basically with Mary turning into Grendel's mom and going on a revenge tour. She decides to go to the Robertson home for revenge and, and to bring Tanya back so that she and Charles can both feed on Tanya. But the scene where she attacks the Robertson home, this is also one of these crazy tonal whiplash scenes where,

Because you get like, oh, you know, parents grieving for like their child being in danger, like this consciousness of the mortality of their child and their child's suffering. And it's, I don't know, it's like a horrible thing to imagine. And it's really tender the way the movie deals with those kind of relationships. But then also Mary shows up and starts stabbing people to death with a corn cob and saying like, no vegetables, no dessert. It's just off the wall.

But again, Alice Krieger is so good that I still buy it. I laugh it all up. This is also the part of the movie where we meet Ron Perlman. And Ron Perlman tries to stop Alice Krieger from fleeing the scene and kidnapping Tanya. But she thwarts him by biting off his fingers. And he screams in pain. And then there is an amazing moment where she...

takes, I think it's Ron Perlman's revolver, and then shoots the police cars so they explode in a fireball. Each one bullet fireball. She one shots each of the cop cars. Just a perfect marksman.

Full Terminator mode, like we said. Yeah. So Mary kidnaps Tanya, takes her back to Casa de Sleepwalker, where the cats have amassed in great, great numbers now. They're overwhelming presence of cats outside. And Mary comes up with a clever way to get inside because otherwise she'd have to go through the yard and there are too many cats. So she drives the police car that they stole through the wall into the house. Yes.

Uh, then takes Tanya inside. She's trying to get the weak wounded Charles to suck out Tanya's soul. Uh, but the monsters are foiled yet again, this time by a combination of cop and cat to the one cop left the sheriff that basically the, the one non comedy relief cop, uh,

shows up and is like trying to help. He blows off the door and comes in to interfere. Of course, Mary ends up skewering him on the picket fence outside. But also the cats, it's just too much cats now. They can't overcome the power of cats. And the cats win the day. The cats have decided that critical mass have been reached. Clovis is here. Clovis leads the charge in through, I believe, one of the upstairs windows. Yeah.

And they're surging in before the soul suck, before the partial resurrection can be achieved. And yeah, this is where we learn, well, we learned this already, but now we get to see it in action. Cats, when they're clawing, especially in great number at the sleepwalkers, their cuts actually cause burns to the sleepwalker's flesh. Yes, like in the scratch-through at the text at the beginning, yeah.

And so in the end, Tanya escapes the scene with Clovis in the police car as the last of the sleepwalkers go up in flames from all of the cat scratches. They've got cat scratch fever very bad. And so, yeah, they they drive away or they don't drive away. She actually like backs the car up into a tree. So they drive away by about 50 feet.

And then she's just sitting in the car with Clovis. And the last line of the movie is Tanya saying, it's just you and me now, Clovis. Oh, man. So good. So good. I loved every minute of this film. Even more bonkers than I remember. It's got some very fun performances in it. Lots of cat action. Yeah. Don't listen to the critics from the early 90s. They didn't know what they had.

Any more business to address about sleepwalkers before we wrap it up today? Oh, man, I don't know. We probably didn't do the Terminator rampage complete justice because it just comes out of nowhere and then it doesn't stop. And yeah, the corncob stabbing, picket fencing, finger eating. There's a lot of cool telekinesis. And you think that her son is dead and she's like, you must dance with him. And she's going to like...

At first, it seems like she's going to telekinetically resurrect him and just kind of puppet him around and make her dance with him. But then he revives to some extent. So there's a lot of Stephen King's-y horror packed into those last 20 minutes or so. Yeah, they kind of...

When she first shows up and is trying to make Charles dance with her, it's kind of Texas Chainsaw. Like, Grandpa was a one-hitter kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah. But no, I think Charles is still alive. They're kind of faking her out, right? He does sort of end up sucking the purple juice out. I mean, I feel like he's about dead. Yeah, he is about dead. But a little soul-sucking would...

fix things if they were able to pull it off. But thankfully, they are not able to do so. Tanya keeps her soul and gains a new friend in Clovis. Yeah. Unclear if her, to be a little morbid, if her family is still alive. I don't think they resolved her. Her parents are at least what? They did not. Yeah, we didn't get a clear. I think we see dad is still breathing. Mom is like in a heap on the front yard. Who knows? Yeah. Yeah.

It's possible that some cats came in to like lick them back into back to health, you know, because the cats are on the case. That's possible.

They can save, if you've ever seen Catwoman with Halle Berry, cats can save you from mortal wounds by sort of climbing up on you and breathing in your face. That's close enough. I'll accept it. I guess my hope here, Clovis survives. Tanya survives. I think what happens clearly is that Tanya is going to go on to coach a women's basketball team.

And Clovis is going to be the mascot. And somewhere out there in the world, there is one more surviving sleepwalker, and that sleepwalker wants revenge. I don't know where the rest goes. We'll have to ask Tabitha King about that, but I want to see it. That's good. Though I thought you were going to say Tanya becomes like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but the sleepwalker slayer.

She has to she has to hunt them all around though. I guess in Buffy. They always come to her They come to her town, don't they? Yeah. Yeah, I mean it works out like there's they were over a hell now, so it makes sense. All right Well, that is Stephen King's sleepwalkers Obviously we'd love to hear from everyone out there Regarding this film, but also Stephen King movies in general. What are some of your favorites? Would you have some guilty pleasures and so forth? All of that is fair game

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Weirdhouse Cinema: Sleepwalkers

Stuff To Blow Your Mind

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Weirdhouse Cinema: Sleepwalkers 01:39:23 Share

Stuff To Blow Your Mind

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Weirdhouse Cinema: Sleepwalkers